Abstract

Collocations generated by concordancers are a standard instrument in the exploitation of text corpora for the analysis
of language use. Multimodal corpora show similar types of patterns, activities that frequently occur together, but there is
no tool that offers facilities for visualising such patterns. Examples include timing of eye contact with respect to speech, and the alignment of activities of the two hands in
signed languages. This paper describes recent enhancements to the standard CLARIN tools ELAN and TROVA for multimodal annotation to address these needs: first of all the
query and concordancing functions were improved, and secondly the tools now generate visualisations of multilayer
collocations that allow for intuitive explorations and analyses of multimodal data. This will provide a boost to the linguistic fields of gesture and sign language studies, as it will improve the exploitation of multimodal corpora.